Thursday, 14 July 2016

AAR - A Scattergun Approach

Furniture WIP: Two bookshelves secured to wall in hobby/painting room. Made a start on the wall-shelves to go above my painting table (power tools - yay!!) but my drill ran out of charge before I'd finished the first wall bracket. The battery is recharged now and I should finish them by lunchtime tomorrow, barring any mishaps.

Hmmmm, I suppose I should do the AAR from Monday's game of Gruntz with J Womack (Scattergun Gamer) & sons...

I'd set up the scenario with the NSL having landed an advance force on a planet they've laid claim to, but have since discovered that there is a pre-existing alien settlement there which puts the claim in jeopardy. They've decided to eliminate and remove all traces of the alien presence before the UNSC find out. The Crusties are aware of the arrival of some aliens on their planet and wondering if they will be friendly. The UNSC have determined that the planet is already occupied, that the NSL have (illicitly) landed a force there and as a result are sending an intervention force to stop the NSL doing anything rash...

The NSL had two infantry platoons and one armoured platoon; the Crusties had a forward platoon, a command platoon situated just behind and a heavy platoon in reserve. the UNSC had a platoon which might come on at some point.

J's sons opted to take the Crusties; J and I took the NSL; Simon was umpiring and taking the UNSC.

Each force (NSL, Crusties, UNSC) had their own victory conditions. To keep track I decided to use some plastic "gold" coins I bought for piratey games.

The first turn saw the NSL and Crusties making initial moves. One of J's APCs had line of sight on one of the Crusty buildings so he took a shot and caused some damage (one of victory conditions).

Turn 2 saw the NSL armour arrive on table, just to add to the chaos. The Crusties had a 1 in 3 chance that their heavy platoon would come on this turn - it didn't.

There was soon a bit of a traffic jam in the centre of the NSL deployment zone...

Turn 3 saw the Crusty reinforcements and the UNSC both arrive on table, increasing the chaos mucho mucho - we only just had enough activation cards for the units that were deployed. And some of the APCs hadn't disembarked their squads...

A Crusty walker managed to score enough damage to knock out one of my APCs. It didn't blow up, but the crew and troops didn't manage to bail out. That gave the Crusties 8 victory points.

However, one of my other APCs managed to finish off a Crusty building - another 3 VPs for the NSL.

Lots of toys on the table!

The Crusty unit with the brown and orange tokens was the victim of friendly fire from a mortar whose round deviated right on top of them - four hits, four casualties.

We did start turn 4, but realised it had got to chucking-out time so called it quits. The NSL had managed to take out another building and some more units, just inching ahead for VPs.

To round it off, here's a pic of all involved:

Simon, me (yikes!), sons*, J*One is Dane/Dain the other Zane/Zain - can't remember which way round!

It was a fun but very chaotic game.

Lessons Learned:

For multi-player/multi-force games cut down the number of units/points for each force. If nothing else, it will reduce the weight I've got to carry to the club!

Don't use the activation cards, or only use them to determine the order that forces (rather than units) activate.

Sort out the deployment zones so that units don't have too far to move to get into contact, maybe by reducing the playing area (which would also leave space for drinks, sheets and other clutter at either end of the table).

This is interesting. I'd like to know how you managed to play Gruntz with multi-based units. Shooting is explained quite well in the rules, but I always wondered how CC works. If two infantry bases touch each other everybody is in combat? How do you solve things like decimated units which are outnumbered by the charging unit? Thanks a lot,